Goldman Skates

After a yearlong investigation, the Justice Department said Thursday that it won't bring charges against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS +1.06% or any of its employees for financial fraud related to the mortgage crisis.

In a statement, the Justice Department said "the burden of proof" couldn't be met to prosecute Goldman criminally based on claims made in an extensive report prepared by a U.S. Senate panel that investigated the financial crisis.

Let's see…. the standard of proof is "beyond a reasonable doubt." Do you think a jury would be convinced if you could show that…

The report concluded that even as securities firms flooded the market with securitized mortgages and advised clients to buy them, firms privately used words like "crap" and "flying pig" to describe the financial instruments.

And this is not sufficient for a jury to find that "beyond a reasonable doubt" the people who bought those securities were deceived as to what Goldman believed about them?

That's an interesting conclusion by the US Just-US department.

If you want to know why we're going exactly nowhere in the United States from an economic perspective, you need only look to this decision. Entrepreneurs simply do not have the influence to obtain this sort of "Just-US", and thus they must play by the rules. But the banksters do not have that infirmity; whatever they want to do, they appear to be able to get away with — and they will not be prosecuted even when their own emails show that they are calling the allegedly-valuable securities they're selling "crap" and a "flying pig" internally.

You would have to be out of your mind to invest in a small business today, or to start one, as this is what you're competing against.